The Morning Girl

I was very confused, if not disoriented when I heard a high pitch of a girl's voice. For some reason I at first thought it belonged to my cousin Maureen then of course I thought it was Jenni's. It was a muffled sound and didn't say words that made sense to me but that wasn't important at the time. What was that it was a female voice and it was disorienting.

When I made sense of anything, I was surprised to find myself just waking up in my bed. In my room no less. These days, my surroundings surprise me wherever I wake even though, unless I fall asleep on the couch, it is invariably my bedroom.

Once the confusion left, I scanned quickly to see if it was a sound I heard in a dream that got brought out with me. That is also a source of confusion for me when I wake up. A lot of the sounds I hear first thing in the morning are imaginary, either vividly remembered from a dream, happening coming out of sleep so that for a few strange moments the real world and my dream is combined, or the opposite - when my brain is just entering dream mode. Some people might call this last one audio hallucinations but they are dreams without the words and can only happen I am just about to fall asleep.

As soon as I figured out that I had just woken up, I checked my memory against all of these scenarios. However, the dreams had been wiped clean, as usually happen when I wake startled, and it was impossible for me to tell if it was real or imagined. My list of who it could really be floated through my head as I fought the confusion of waking. I was still extremely foggy but heard the distinct sound of lips smacking as they broke the seal made with someone else's lips. Closely following it was a muted male’s voice and a female voice.

At the thought of implied sex my body awoke beyond being able to immediately fall back asleep. I knew the grating voice could only belong to my roommate Ryan and I'm not interested in listening to him have sex. Last time I heard squishing noises I had to go hang out at someone else’s apartment until I was sure they were done.

Despite what I did not want to hear, my body was cycling awake. Their voices were murmurs and I was still groggy from what I assumed was four hours of sleep. Nevertheless, my mind slowly and gently went through all the possibilities in the logic that only makes sense to those half asleep. Ally was the girl he really liked because she was our cousin Maureen's friend and easy access into the “older cousins” crowd he is so desperate to hang out with. She is kinda slutty, though, and more than a little crazy - which of course go hand in hand.

Ugly girl who likes country was from his High School and must have been his girlfriend at some point because she came and visited him for one night. He has a thing for her because she is one of the ugly girls in some of the pictures in his room.

Then there was Cute LaCrosse girl. I thought LaCrosse players would be butch but she looked small, if not frail, and cute and full of energy. He of course dropped the ball on this one. I heard them up for an hour and a half after they came in but it sounded like heart to heart discussions between drunks at 3 a.m. The irony was that those situations make me want to vomit and he claimed they went to bed right away because she was vomiting all night. Something didn't fit right but he lies so much about so many things, that I just let them go or else I'd constantly be arguing with him about reality.

This whole time their voices were sifting through my closet wall and by the time I settled on Cute LaCrosse girl, I was awake enough to pick out consonants and then actual words. I may or may not have had an erection at this point, it's hard to remember now. The voices started close together during the kiss but were separated now and her voice was becoming quieter. Not farther away but more timid and less sure of itself. His voice of course betrayed his usual, uninteresting, beige personality. It is a voice that would never be mistaken as sympathetic but is a good mimic of the hot guys with the crazy hair in the shitty WB teen dramas.

Her timid voice was now by the front door with a gentle pleading tone that said are you serious? The first words I caught were his response.

"Yeah, just go out that way and turn and it will be like three blocks down."

I still wasn't able to pick out her words when she replied because I don't know her voice pattern. But what I thought was are you serious? in her voice was actually why are you rejecting me? i'm cute and young and vulnerable. Her reply was after an awkward silence and her words were chosen cautiously. Even though I couldn’t hear the exact words I could tell that she did not want to go. None of this registered in him.

"No. You'll be fine, stop whining. Hardly anyone ever gets mugged on campus."

Before I had my suspicions that he was a misogynist but, while that is still a possibility, I think it is more that he lacks empathy for anyone else. That's not even addressing the erroneous statement about the frequency of people getting mugged on campus or the fact that she was, more likely than not, afraid of getting raped than having $20, her fake Prada bag, and her cell phone stolen. And it's not that he is callous, I think it's just that he doesn't feel empathy and is mildly antagonistic to women.

The door opened and I heard her say something from the hall. It was softer than before and that wasn't just because she was farther away. There was rejection in her voice that made her more timid and vulnerable than ever.

"Go ahead. It's just three blocks," was his reply.

She left and he went to the bathroom, his room, then I heard his flip flops going outside and returning ten minutes later from a cigarette. I lost interest and started dozing at this point. He may or may not have watched TV before going to bed.

I'm not saying that men should take advantage of women but this was clearly a different situation. She wanted him and he rejected her. He wouldn't even walk her home. Why the fuck did he drop the ball? She didn't come back to his apartment for only a kiss and he sent her packing without any regard to her safety. Maybe, I should have woken up and walked her home but that would have been majorly creepy and I'm trying to cut back on the creep factor.